


Little Johnny Boy (God's Gonna Cut You Down)

by Scribiter



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Courier Six needs a hug tbh, M/M, Mental Illness, Novelization, Visual/auditory hallucinations, considering that I don't know what's going to happen either, eventual Male Courier/Arcade Gannon, i'm writing this as I play it, not sure when he's gonna show up though, tags will be updated as story progresses, that might be a bad idea
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-29
Updated: 2015-01-21
Packaged: 2018-03-03 06:56:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2842085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scribiter/pseuds/Scribiter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Johnny wondered what most people did in his predicament. Cry, maybe. Plead for their life, probably. Yeah, he wondered about his Momma, but he didn’t call for her like a babe. He was eighteen; might as well have been a grown man. A nancy boy he might have been, but that just wouldn’t do. So he grinned and asked the man in the checkered suit for a cigarette instead.</p><p>"If my story's gonna be messed up from the start, how about we make it as jacked-up as humanly possible?" --Courier Six, probably</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Alea Iacta Est (The Die Has Been Cast)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, guys! So this is the first fanfic I have ever written like. Ever. And to pile on to that, I have decided to do something incredibly dumb and write this fanfic as I play the game for the first time. So I have no idea where the hell this is going to go. I am possibly putting way too much trust into this thing. 
> 
> If I retcon anything for the sake of continuity, I'll let you know in the author's notes; and if you notice that I mess up any Fallout verse lore, just drop me a notice and I'll get it fixed up as quick as possible. Also, considering that I'm on winter break until a little bit after New Year's, I'll probably get a few chapters done quickly and then have to slow when second semester crops up.
> 
> All that aside, thanks for reading!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> //edit: Retroactively added a gun into Johnny's listed inventory to prepare for chapter three! This is what you get for writing a novelization for a game you haven't finished.

_One_

_“One of these days, God’s gonna cut you down, little Johnny boy; Lord, oh Lord, God’s gonna cut you down.”_

Johnny couldn’t remember where he had heard those words for the life of him. Whenever he thought of them, the lyrics came with a vision of a sluggish record player, record spinning lazily in the dusty air; the needle stuttering and skipping over scratches in the vinyl, a sleeve resting against the side of the cabinet with a technicolor picture he couldn’t dredge from memory. A dusty farm house deep in the Mojave desert. Skies speckled with clouds that never brought rain. But that record player, always that record player. 

It couldn’t have been talking about him. There were plenty of Johnnies in the world, and the woman singing those words with her drawling contralto could have been talking about any of them. Even then, he couldn’t help it but think that the words were a little too close to home. The lyrics felt as if that woman were standing just behind him—the kind of dame with skin the color of the night sky and lips red as roses, hands on his shoulders and whispering chaste words into his ear as her fingernails dug into his skin. She tapped his cheek, harder, then slapped him full across the face, and his eyes snapped open.

The sound of a shovel digging not ten feet from his spot half-conscious on the ground made him squeeze his eyes shut against the burlap sack just as quickly as he had opened them. The sandy soil gave under the shovel’s blade, clattering with rocks and gravel and dried weeds. He was tired. Lord, he was so damn tired. Every time he tried to breathe deep, something other than shallow hyperventilating, he felt bile rise up in his throat, bitter dust caked onto his tongue. He knew better than to move. His temple throbbed from the last time he had spat curses and tried to struggle onto his feet only to be greeted with a steel-toed boot to the side of the head. 

A pair of hands grabbed his shoulders, manhandled him into kneeling in the sand. Gooseflesh prickled against the frigid desert night, and his head lolled forward on a neck he couldn’t bring himself to raise. He blinked against the dust that rattled about inside the sack, flexed his fingers from where his hands were tied tight in front of him, just to remind himself that they were still working. 

_“God’s gonna cut you down, little Johnny boy,”_ she said, deep inside his head where he was sure he was still dreaming, and he wondered just how God was going have his captors do that. They could slit his throat. Tighten the bag around his neck until he suffocated in the dust. Bury him alive in that damn grave they had been digging for the past twenty minutes. Leave him bound in the desert for the deathclaws and buzzards. Or just shoot him between the eyes like a proper goddamn gentleman. He wasn’t sure which one he wanted to happen. 

The hands grabbed the burlap sack and tore it from his head, ripping out chunks of hair that had gotten stuck between their fingers. Johnny reeled forward, gasping for clean air, chest heaving, gagging so heavily that a string of bile fell from his lips. He spit into the dust and finally lifted his head, which rolled backwards until he was staring at the sky. It was the middle of the night, stars dotting the sky in constellations he couldn’t recognize, couldn't name, with only the flickering flame of a small lantern perched on a scrap of rotting fence warding off the darkness. There was nothing else around. It was dark, too dark, _far_ too dark for miles. He wheezed and finally managed to focus his eyes, head jerking down to stare at his hands. 

That’s right, he found himself thinking as he tried to find a more comfortable position. His ankles were tied, too. Running wasn’t going to happen.

They were bickering. Whoever the hell they were, Johnny didn’t know, he had never seen them before. Something about getting paid. There were three of them. He thought. Maybe four, he could still hear the sound of digging. Could he? Or was the woman’s singing making that crackling in his ears?

“He’s up again,” one of them said. Johnny narrowed his eyes, forced himself to make out the details. One had a shovel, an orange mohawk. One reminded him of Genghis Khan, what with the handlebar moustache. Johnny wrinkled his nose. But the one in the middle, showing off the whites of his eyes and looking all snappy-like in his checkered suit. That had to be him. The one in charge. Johnny would have been incredibly disappointed if it wasn’t. 

Checkers took a step forward, and Genghis Khan made a disgusted noise in his throat, asking for him to get it over with. Mohawk looked way too excited for this whole thing. Johnny set his face in stone, drew his lips into a thin line, settled himself so that he wasn’t cutting off blood flow to his legs. Harsh words traded between Genghis and Checkers; Genghis made a defeated sort of noise and stepped back. 

“You dig?” Checkers said. Johnny wasn’t sure if it was meant for him. Even if it was, he wasn’t going to respond. He swallowed back the rest of the bile despite the awful, burning taste in his throat. 

Checkers knelt down, fished in his breast pocket to reveal a single poker chip. It had been in Johnny’s pocket last he remembered. That was supposed to go to the New Vegas Strip. Not...whoever the hell this was. 

“You’ve made your last delivery, kid,” Checkers said, holding it up so that it was inescapably in Johnny’s line of sight. He jerked his head to the side, a small defiance, before Checkers snapped his fingers in front of his face. Johnny practically growled, eyes flickering back towards him. “Sorry you got twisted up in this scene,” he said, replacing the poker chip and revealing a gold-plated pistol. “I really am.”

 _Bullshit,_ Johnny thought. He wanted to say it, spit the words in their faces, but the sight of that polished gold 9mm so damn close to his head made his throat lock like a vice. That man wasn’t sorry. He was far too enthusiastic to be sorry, there was too much of the whites of his eyes for him to be _sorry._ Johnny wondered what most people did in his predicament. Cry, maybe. Plead for their life, probably. Yeah, he wondered about his Momma, but he didn’t call for her like a babe. He was eighteen; might as well have been a grown-ass man. A nancy boy he might have been, but that just wouldn’t do. So he grinned and asked the man in the checkered suit for a cigarette instead.

“Wait, wait a second, buddy,” Johnny said, leaning his cheek against his shoulder. Checkers faltered. “Do you have a smoke? I hear it’s custom to give poor bastards like me at least one more cigarette before you blow our brains out.” His teeth were stained red with blood. The smile cracked at the tan, dry skin of his face. It was humorless. Good. It was supposed to be. Checkers wasn’t supposed to laugh, but he did anyway. 

“You’re a good kid,” he said to him, and slapped Mohawk in the chest. Mohawk blinked dumbly before dropping the shovel and rummaging in his pocket for a beat-up packet of cigarettes and a rusted lighter. Johnny carefully took the offered smoke, holding the orange-tipped end gently between his lips, and paused as Mohawk clicked the lighter to life and held the flame to the end of the stick. Johnny nodded in thanks and took in a deep breath, the cloud-white smoke trailing from the corners of his mouth. It curled upwards through the branches of a long-dead tree, up towards the stars. 

“Hurry up,” Genghis snarled. Checkers held up a hand, a condescending look to shush him.

“From where you’re kneeling, it must seem like an eighteen karat run of bad luck,” Checkers said, turning back to Johnny and giving the 9mm a loving once-over. Johnny nodded. Looked like the man was going to go on with his villainous monologue anyway, interruption or not. Or maybe it was just that he was giving this random Courier boy to enjoy one last nicotine rush before they dumped him in a shallow grave. How considerate. 

“Yeah,” Johnny said around the cigarette, careful not to let it fall from his lips. “It really does, actually. I’d rather not be shot, if, you know, I had a say in this whole thing.” His voice sounded strange, awkwardly mumbled through the side of his mouth, but it was better than dropping the smoke. He took another drag. Genghis and Mohawk were getting twitchy. Johnny blew the smoke from his nose and suppressed an awful coughing that just made him choke.

Checkers released the safety of that shining pistol, held it at arm’s length with one hand; slightly tilted as if he were either cocky as hell or just trying to fake that he was. Johnny wasn’t sure which one it was; which one he wanted it to be. The barrel was barely a foot from Johnny’s left eye. His vision blurred. 

“Truth is,” Checkers said with an apologetic shrug, “the game was rigged from the start.”

To Johnny, the words “Fuck you, old man,” letting the cigarette drop from his lips into the sand, each syllable punctuated by a stream of smoke, seemed like good enough last words as Checkers pulled the trigger. 

 

_Two_

She was singing again, and all Johnny wanted was for her to stop. 

She didn’t wake him up with a slap, like she had before. She stood on the other side of the room, slowly winding the crank of the record player, humming along to the warbling vinyl. He stood from a chair he couldn’t remember, unsteady on his feet, blood dripping from the gaping wound drawn across his face, warm and sticky against his skin. The reek of copper churned his empty stomach, nauseating with her lavender perfume. She smiled and he reached up to feel the hole in his skull where part of his head had once been, the muscle and bone and what was left of his eye hanging limply in its socket. The music of the record thrummed in and out of focus, the room stretching so that she was five feet away, then twenty, then five again.

It didn’t hurt. Somehow, that was the worst part about it. He could feel blood running down his lips, dripping off his chin, each and every shard of lead in his skull far more clearly than he ever should have been able to, but none of it _hurt._ He took a step forward that almost pitched him to the ground, the world reeling about him and he was almost sure that he had stepped onto a floor that wasn’t there. There was vertigo in his stomach but no jarring of his brains in his broken skull as his foot finally slammed to the ground.

But nothing hurt in a dream, Johnny told himself, and he reached for the record player to lift the bamboo needle off the vinyl. Her rose-red lips drew into a pout, and Johnny woke up not in his shallow grave, but on a bed in a dusty old house. 

“Shit,” he whimpered, staring at the ceiling as a cracked fan slogged uselessly through the heavy Mojave air. He wasn’t sure what he was swearing for, but it had all seemed a whole lot simpler when he had just died in that hole in the ground. The fan blurred, doubled, tripled in his vision, then slowly came back to one. “Shit,” he repeated, louder, just to prove to himself that he could. He tried something else that was meant to be something along the lines of “Goddammit,” but the word slurred together in his mouth to the point that it was nothing more than a jumble of syllables. Everything was still so blissfully numb. Was he still dreaming? 

“You’re awake. How ‘bout that.”

Johnny had no clue who the hell that was. He jammed a hand into the rough mattress and heaved himself onto his opposite elbow, the world spinning around him again and throwing him half-way off the cot. Footsteps pounded against the hardwood floor and a pair of hands gently took his shoulder and pushed him back, letting him settle back onto the mattress and ratty pillow. “Easy, easy,” the voice soothed. “You’ve been out cold for a couple of days now.”

It was an old man with a scarf tied around his neck, all the hair that was supposed to be on his head sprouting from his moustache instead. The world snapped back into focus just at the sheer absurdity of it. He had never seen a person that old before. Back home, they would have died a long time ago. Johnny narrowed his eyes, and—

He reached up to where a massive swath of bandages had obscured his left eye. The tips of his fingers dragged along his eyebrow, cheekbone, but he was too scared to brush across the socket. He wasn’t surprised though. After being shot in the face, he would have been worried if he was fine. 

“Relax, boy,” the old man said, not unkindly, although Johnny wished they had been. He needed somebody to be mad at, and it might as well have been himself. The man sat himself down on a small, splintered chair next to the cot. “How do you feel?”

“Like shit,” Johnny slurred. 

“Well, I could have told you that,” the old man chuckled. “You have a bit of Med-X in your system, so you’re going to be a little slow.” Oh. That would explain it. “Don’t push yourself too hard.”

“Nngh,” was Johnny’s reply, trying to carefully lay back down and only managing to collapse onto the pillow. 

“Can you tell me your name?” the old man asked. It almost sounded condescending, like he were speaking to a toddler—but hazed up on chems as he was, Johnny couldn’t bring himself to care all that much.

“Johnny,” he said. “Johnny...Chavez.” Pause. “I think.”

“Thinking is good,” the old man said. “My name’s Mitchell, but you can just call me Doc. Nice to meet a boy nowadays with a good old American name. Too many people nowadays giving their children those new, ‘hip’ names, if you ask me.”

Johnny blinked. 

“Sorry,” Doc said. “You’ve just woken up, and here I am, rambling. Welcome to Goodsprings, Johnny, good to have you up and breathing.” He stood up from the chair, and when Johnny went to sit up, Doc shook his head and motioned for him to lay back down. “Now, now, I'm just getting something for you real quick, you stay there.”

And then Doc walked out into a side room, leaving Johnny to stare up at the ceiling fan. Even in nothing more than his pants, it was suffocatingly hot. That fan wasn’t doing a goddamn thing. He reached up to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then his hand on the stained sheets that looked like they had seen their fair share of people like him, jacked up and bleeding. Doc came back with a glass of water, a mirror tucked under his arm, and a small plastic box with chipped baby-blue paint. 

“Thought you might want this,” Doc said, handing him the glass of water. Johnny nodded and took a drink, although he could only manage a small sip before he had to set it on the side table. His throat felt like there was a massive crack down the middle of it, dry and painful, and swallowing brought tears to his eyes. He didn’t want to think about what it would have been like if he wasn’t drugged up. 

“Doc,” he finally managed, doing his best to make sure the words came out semi-coherently. “What’s with the bandages?” 

Mitchell let out a quiet sigh. “Being shot in the face ain’t an easy fix,” he said. “I had to go rooting around in your noggin to get all the pieces of lead out. And I have to say, all that sand and dirt and nasty stuff that got into that hole in your head really messed you up. Graves aren’t the cleanest places, you know.” He set down the chipped box and held out the mirror. Johnny took it carefully. It was dirty and smudged, cracked in the corner. “Now, I’m proud of my needlework, and I’m pretty sure that I’ve done all I could to fix that face of yours, but your eye—well, your eye ain’t so lucky.”

Johnny was silent, propping up the mirror so that he could see his own face. Russet skin, black eyes, bleached hair tinged with pink sticking up in all directions; he looked tired, nervous, sick. He frowned. The bandages obscured his entire left eye, up to his hairline, over to his nose, halfway down his cheek. He blinked. He couldn’t feel much of anything on the other side. Mitchell sighed and reached over to peel the bandage from Johnny’s face, the noise of the adhesive gently tearing making Johnny wince. There was a nasty bit of scar flesh, paler than what was around it, a few stitches still darting in and out of his skin—and his left eye was closed, the eyelids awkwardly caved in. 

“I had to remove your eye,” Doc said. “It was infected, and there’s no doctor in the Mojave that could’a salvaged it.” 

“Oh,” Johnny said, quiet enough that he wasn’t even sure he said anything at all. He reached up to gently brush his fingers over his eyelids, flinching as they gave slightly under his thumb. “It—”

Doc reached for the box, set it down on the bed and clicked open the lid. “I took the liberties of fitting the insert for your socket while you were asleep, so there’s already a bit of something in there, but you’re going to have to tell me how well it fits.”

“Excuse me?” Johnny said. 

Doc motioned for the mirror. “Take a look,” he said. “Just do this.” He mimed pulling his eyelids apart so that his eye was eerily wide. Johnny swallowed, and did the same. There was already something there, an off-white ping-pong ball-sized piece of plastic. When he looked around, the discoloration on it shifted. It moved. “Another eye,” another said. “To protect the socket, if nothing more. It ain’t going to hurt you. Now, you’re still gonna be as blind as a bat in that eye, but at least you won’t be looking like a raider around these parts.” 

Johnny blinked again, to reassure himself that he could. “It’s blank,” he said. Doc handed him what had been inside the box. It was the size of a bottle-cap, oddly shaped and rounded, and painted onto it was a simple brown iris. 

“This goes on over it,” Doc said. “Your muscles are sewn into that ball in your head, so you won’t be able to take that out, but this you can pull out of your face whenever you want.” 

Johnny took it. It was light, thin and fragile. He felt like he would break it if he tried to bend it in the slightest. “Did you make it?”

“Sure did,” Doc said. “I’ll help you put it in.” 

Doc was right, it didn’t hurt, but it didn’t make it any better that the man had peeled back his eyelid and had set a false eye into his no-longer-empty socket. It looked a bit off, the color was slightly different and his eyelids still didn’t want to open all the way, but—Johnny swallowed. It seemed fine.

“Thank you,” Johnny said, not sure if he meant it. He reached over for another sip of water, pushing the mirror away from him. He wanted to be rude, he needed _somebody_ to be mad at, but Doc Mitchell just didn’t seem like the guy. 

“You’re awful welcome,” Doc said. “You think you can stand? No use keeping you in bed anymore.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said. “I think so.” 

Doc held out hands to steady him as Johnny pushed himself to his feet, wobbling and reaching for an IV stand to support himself. Johnny knew damn well that he wasn’t the tallest person in the world, but next to Doc, he was harshly reminded of that fact and he scrubbed his hand across his face. When he touched his false eye, he jerked his hand away as if he were afraid he was going to knock it out of place. 

“You okay?” Doc asked. 

“Maybe,” Johnny said. 

Doc’s house—or office, whatever it was, Johnny couldn’t think too long or hard on it—was dull and brown, dusty and simple. There was a broken, paralyzed clock hanging lopsided on the wall, an operating table on the other side of the room. It certainly didn't look like the cleanest or safest place for an operation. 

“Are you hungry?”

Johnny shook his head. “No,” he finally managed. In truth, he was, he really was, but he already felt like he was going to throw up and he didn’t want to stay here any longer than necessary. 

“Come in to the living room. Just a few tests; nothing too awful, promise.”

And that’s what it was. Doc checked his remaining eye, his pulse, his blood pressure, made sure that nothing had been accidentally dislodged since he had woken up. Johnny managed to keep his mouth shut through the whole thing, but he could almost feel the last of the Med-X ebbing away and the dull ache of his eye and the sharp pain in his temple and the snappish words bubbling up on his tongue. He wanted this to be done, he wanted his shit back, he wanted to walk out the door and find the bastard that had shot him in the face and left him for dead. Checkers stole the poker chip. And the note in the bag he no longer had on him had made it explicitly clear what would happen if he didn’t get that poker chip to New Vegas. Doc asked if he smoked or anything like that. Johnny didn’t care enough to lie. Doc gave him a harsh look.

“I got a funny feeling I should keep you here for a day or two,” Doc mused as he packed up his stethoscope. “Make sure nothing crops up the way it tends to do.”

“No,” Johnny said, a bit more harsh than he intended. “No, I—I have shit to do, places to be, it’s kind of important.”

Doc raised an eyebrow. “You sure I can’t convince you, boy?” he said. 

“Absolutely,” Johnny said. 

“How old are you, anyway?”

“Old enough.” 

Doc made a humming noise, helplessly shrugging, a bit taken aback by Johnny's sudden shift in behavior. “I have your things in my room,” he said. “I’ll go fetch them.” And the moment that Doc left the room, Johnny stood up from the couch and slipped back into the office. There were a few bottle caps left lying on the counter, and he swept them into his hand, turning them over in his palm and listening to them clatter together. He thought about taking them, and had almost slipped them into his pants pocket before his eye caught a Med-X syringe. He took that instead, shoving it into his back pocket and shuffling around so that it wasn’t as painfully obvious. He’d get more caps selling it to a druggie.

His head snapped up as footsteps came back down the hall, and he leaned against the wall, pretended to look over a scrap of paper on Doc’s wall. It was a bunch of random letters that got smaller as it went further down. He had seen them before but he honestly had no idea what it was. 

“Here.” Doc handed Johnny a torn shirt and a canvas shoulder back with a fraying strap marked _Mojave Express Courier._ “Hope you don’t mind that I went through your things.” Johnny’s eyes flickered up to him, eyebrows narrowing. Doc shrugged innocently. “I thought I could find something about next of kin, but there was just a note about some platinum chip. I didn’t touch nothing else, if that’s what you’re so worried about. And that gun of yours in there looks awful nasty.” 

Johnny took the offered things silently, setting the bag on the floor so he could tug on the shirt. As long as the Doc hadn't tampered with his pistol, he wasn't complaining. Nothing else was of much importance anyway. “So this place is called Goodsprings?” he finally muttered. 

“Sure is,” he said. “Ain’t much, but it’s something.” Johnny grabbed the bag and hefted it over his shoulder, looking at the doctor from underneath his eyebrows. “You looking for somebody in particular?”

“I dunno,” Johnny said. “Probably not. We’ll see.”

“That’s an awful un-reassuring answer there,” Doc said. 

Johnny shrugged. “I guess it is,” he said. “So am I free to go?”

Doc crossed his arms. “Honestly, I’d rather shoot myself in the foot than let you go back out there and find out that I missed something. Being shot in the head ain’t something that you can just shake off. People only got so much luck, and I feel like you used up a whole cartful getting pulled out of the ground alive.”

Johnny tapped his fake eye, ignoring the shudder that ran down his back and trembled at his shoulders. Best get used to it as soon as possible. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’m not a baby.”

“That you’re not,” Doc sighed. “Look, if you’re gonna run off like a fool, this gal named Sunny Smiles down at the saloon will help you keep your blasted head on your shoulders.” He snorted at his own pun. Johnny didn’t respond. “And a metal fella, Victor, the one that pulled you out of your grave; I thought it’d be at least a little rude if you didn’t go thank him.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Johnny said, opening his bag to make sure that everything was still there. “You got anything else?.” He shifted from one foot to the other. Sunny Smiles. He decided to keep the name in mind, despite how strangely optimistic it was. 

“Just this.” 

A Pip-Boy 3000. 

“Ain’t much, but it’s something,” Doc said, holding it out to him. Johnny faltered, staring at the bulky metal contraption, its dull green monitor lay dormant, resting. "I figure it’ll help with aiming and all that, since you only have one eye now. If not, at least I hope it’ll be useful somehow.”

“Uh,” Johnny said. “Thanks.” He turned it around in his hand before clamping it onto his wrist. “You were one of those Vault-dwellers?”

Doc chuckled. “Yeah,” he said. “But that was a long time ago.”

Johnny nodded. “A long time ago,” he repeated, turning it on. “Yeah.” He readjusted the bag. He hated taking things, it made him feel like now he owed the doctor one—not to mention the whole ‘fixing up his face’ thing. And stealing the Med-X. And being a little shit. But he kept his mouth shut, swallowed, and did nothing more than nod again, pushing away from the wall. “I should go.”

“Let me show you out.” 

Doc and Johnny walked to the door, Johnny readjusting his bag, and Doc said, “You don’t hesitate to come back if anything goes wrong, you hear?”

“I hear,” Johnny said. 

There was a record player sitting on the second shelf of the rickety cabinets next to the door. Johnny saw it and the vinyl sleeve leaning against it with its faded and gaudy technicolor, felt his face blanche. _God’s gonna cut you down, little Johnny boy,_ she whispered, and in his haste to get away from her, he lurched through the door and stumbled into the blazing Mojave sun. 

_Hallelujah, hallelujah,_ she murmured, voice edged with steel; the Courier had risen from the grave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Personally I think glass eyes are terrifying


	2. Multum In Parvo (Much In Little)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter is pretty short, mainly because I was originally planning to add in that whole quest with Ringo and eventually decided against it (and managed to cop out of a whole side quest with a line of self-reflective monologue, impressive if I do say so myself). Just wanted to get Johnny on the way to Primm, try my best to bring up his mild psychosis symptoms in a way, and get something posted before school starts up Monday. The next chapter will hopefully be longer, but we'll see how long it takes to get there. 
> 
> Thank you for the comments and kudos you guys! At a commentor's suggestion I edited the make of Checker's pistol to align with the actual thing in the game (from a Magnum to a 9mm). And again, thank you for reading!

_One_

Her voice melted away in the rippling heat, spots dancing in Johnny’s vision as he reached up a hand to shield his good eye from the sun. A windmill churned slowly but steadily down the road, a water tower presiding over the town off in the distance. A small tumbleweed bumped into his leg as he stood in Doc’s front lawn, and he kicked it off to the side so it could continue its journey. 

“Welcome to Goodsprings,” he muttered, looking over his shoulder. She wasn’t there anymore, but he could still feel her eyes raking over his back. One of those stereotypical shivers ran down his spine, and his shoulders jerked in response. He quickly did it again, adjusted his shirt, to make it look like it was no big deal; just fixing something, he told himself.

Doc had been right. Goodsprings wasn’t much of anything, really. A few dry, wooden houses that looked like kindling in the middle of the desert, flat hills providing a makeshift wall around the little settlement. He walked down the front stairs of Doc’s lawn and stood in the middle of the dirt road, taking a deep breath of the sweltering air. He could have stood there in the road with his eyes closed for hours, revelling in the dry heat alone. There was one person he could see, and they were tending a sandy garden by the side of the road, not paying an ounce of attention. He had disappeared again--the only person that knew his name was behind him, and it would have been a blessing if he could have disappeared into the Wastes right then and there. 

But that goddamn poker chip. What the hell had been so special about it anyway? He wasn’t much of a gambler, but surely it couldn’t have been too much trouble to just make another one. He wasn’t about to risk some mysterious man hiding behind the facade of New Vegas siccing a bunch of mercenaries on his ass, though, not now. He had to get it back, or at least blow a hole in the head of the asshole that had done the same to him. And Johnny was going to make sure that he wasn’t getting back up. 

“Howdy, partner!”

“Holy shit.” 

Johnny took a step away from the robot that had wheeled up beside him, its screen in a perpetual state of what he figured was ‘winking cowboy,’ the whole thing top-heavy with long, spindly arms. How it was balancing on one wheel on such a cracked and jacked-up road was beyond him. And Johnny wasn’t one for robots. 

“May I say that you're looking fit as a fiddle!” it crackled, voice painfully cheerful. 

“Uh,” Johnny said, debating over how well rudeness would go over with a robot. “Thanks. You the one that pulled me out of that hole?”

“Yes, indeed-y!” it said. Johnny visibly winced at its voice, something like radio static and an overly-cheerful tour guide. Great. Now he _had_ to be nice to it. 

“Thank you,” he repeated, a bit dully.

“Ah, don’t mention it!” it said. Johnny swallowed. He hated robots. For somebody who took solace in being a prick, he sure wasn’t very good at it sometimes. Maybe the bullet had knocked a bit more loose than he thought. “I’m always ready to lend a hand to a stranger in need, and it just didn’t seem right to bury somebody in the old bone orchard that was still bleeding.” Okay, way too friendly. And a bit creepy. Johnny forced a smile. 

“Well, you have a good day, now,” Johnny said. Did you say that to robots? “See you around.” Hopefully not. 

“Happy trails!” Jesus Christ. 

It wheeled off, leaving Johnny to stand in the middle of the road. He brushed off his hands onto his pants and told himself, _Hey, at least it wasn’t a record player._

Something occurred to him. “Sonuvabitch,” he snarled. “Uh, hey! Robot guy!”

The robot—hadn’t Doc said his name was Victor or something?—paused and turned itself in a little circle. “Need something?”

“Yeah,” Johnny muttered. “Did you see what way the guys who shot me went? By any chance?”

Victor hummed and hawed a little bit over the question, as much as a robot could hum and haw, and eventually came out with, “I figure I can’t quite right recall,” he said. “Some of the fine folks in town might know, if you ask around.”

Great. Asking around. That meant spending time here. Maybe that Sunny Smiles chick Doc had said something about might know. Or she might know the way to Primm. The idea made his stomach churn. As much as he didn’t want to go to Primm, that hellhole of a town as it was, maybe the people who had actually given him the goddamn job might know why the hell somebody would have wanted to shoot him for it. 

“Wonderful,” Johnny said. “Thanks.”

“No problem!” Victor said, and Johnny wondered if it had ever been programmed to understand sarcasm. A second later, he looked over to the saloon, justified a drink with the hole in his head, and made his way over. 

He said nothing to the man on the front porch, and the man on the front porch didn’t say anything, either, as Johnny stepped under the awning. He made a snarky remark in the back of his head about how the place didn’t look too rich anymore, but it didn’t sound as good when he muttered it under his breath. Nothing ever did. The porch creaked under his weight, one of the boards shifting underfoot, and he skittered to the safety of the threshold. He opened the wooden door, and the first thing he noticed was the music lazily drifting from the jukebox in the corner— 

_“Lord, oh Lord, God’s gonna cut you down.”_

Shit. 

 

_Two_

Johnny froze in the doorway of the Prospector Saloon, his one of his cracked fingernails digging into the rotting wood of the doorframe. A mutt on the other side of the room started up with an ungodly racket of barking, prompting a shush from its owner and a jerk on its collar. 

Not that song. 

It had been years since he had heard that goddamn record, not just in dreams or in the back of his head or just at the corner of his hearing, but actually _heard_ it in a way that made him sure that he wasn’t just hallucinating, not just hearing things that made him want to claw out his ears with his bare hands. The dog’s owner was saying something, going to stand, and Johnny pushed away from the doorframe and practically slammed the door shut, taking a shuddering breath. Not that song, not that goddamn song. He glanced at the window and prayed that _she_ wouldn’t be standing on the other side of the glass. 

But she wasn’t. The song faded off on its last warbling note, he hadn’t even noticed that it was the end of the song, and as another record thunked into place, he finally heard, “Hey. You look like you need a drink. You alright?”

A shuddering breath. A mumbled, “Kind of.” He pushed away from the door and looked up at the young woman—it wasn’t her, it wasn’t her, he repeated in his head—standing in front of him. There was a rifle slung across her back, her cheeks and shoulders flushed from the heat. The dog was standing behind her, sniffing at the floor looking for scraps. She nodded, gave him some space and let him slide down into one of the torn upholstery booths where he leaned his head against his hand. The next song on the jukebox came into play, a relatively upbeat trumpet-and-piano combo paired with a man’s voice bouncing and sliding over the notes. Johnny groaned. 

“You sure you’re okay?” she asked. Johnny nodded again. 

“Yeah,” he said. He managed to wriggle his way out of the strap of his bag and set it between him and the wall, and the woman with the rifle patted the table before walking into the other room. The dog stayed where it was on the floor, watching him with dark eyes. Johnny glanced around the room—it was empty—before smiling and waving to it. Its ears perked up. “Hey, buddy,” he said. 

The dog got up and followed its owner into the other room. 

Johnny sighed and set his arm on the table, awkwardly knocking a knuckle against the Pip-Boy clamped onto his arm. Vault Boy was there to meet him, grinning that grin with his thumb held up in the air in either a gesture of accomplishment or gauging the height of a nuclear blast. It had always pissed him off, wherever he saw the damn thing. He couldn’t put his finger on why. His thumb rolled against the scroll wheel, clicking gently as he pursued through the notes and statistics. Heart rate, temperature, a few old notes. Something blipped on the corner of the screen, asking if his eye was okay. Yeah, his eye was fine, he told it. The note went away. 

There was a map on this damned thing? Granted, it was two-tone, and both of those tones were shades of green, but it did its best. The scroll wheel zoomed out as far as it could manage, but eventually the map refused to go any further and he was stuck with a few squiggly lines labeled Goodsprings and a few dots in the Wasteland beyond, but nothing labeled Primm. Or anything else, for that matter. 

The woman with the rifle came back and set a glass of dirty water in front of him. No ice. Johnny blinked, looking up from the Pip-Boy. There was a stern look on her face, but it looked forced; the corners of her eyes were crinkled up into a smile. 

“I don’t work here,” she said, “so don’t go getting the wrong idea. But you look like you just crawled out of the ground.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said, a bit monotone. 

“It’s a nice way of saying you look like hell,” she said. That’s right. he was thirsty—he had barely even touched the glass of water Doc had got him. It was a bit cloudy but he had gotten used to drinking strange water over the years. He carefully reached for the glass. 

“I know,” Johnny said. “I actually _did_ just crawl out of the ground, so—”

“Oh!” she said. “You’re the guy Doc had passed out in his house for a week. Honestly, _I’m_ surprised to see you up and running about like this already.” 

Johnny took a drink. “Yeah, well, I have somewhere to be, can’t exactly stay for rehabilitation or anything. Shit to do, you know.”

“That sort of mentality will get you killed one of these days.”

Johnny shrugged. “Will it?”

“How long have you even been in the Mojave?” she asked, leaning forward on the table. 

“Long as I can remember.”

She gave him a long, hard look. “My name’s Sunny Smiles,” she eventually said, holding out a hand. Changing the subject. Johnny was on the verge of doing the same. He shook her hand; she had a tough, calloused grip, but he figured that if somebody around here had baby-smooth hands, they’d been in a coma all their life. 

“Doc told me to come talk to you,” Johnny said. Stop being snappy, he thought, snappy won’t get you information. “You wouldn’t happen to know how to get to Primm, would you?” 

She paused a bit at his sudden change in personality, but said, “Yeah, I do. You take the road southeast of town ‘til it hits the freeway. Primm is the town with the roller coaster, straight south. Can’t miss it.” 

Johnny repeated the instructions in his head and nodded. “Thank you,” he said. 

“You wouldn’t be one of those Couriers, would you?” Sunny asked. 

“I am,” he said. 

“That would explain it,” she chuckled. “You bastards are insane.”

“Are we?” Johnny wanted to ask. But he knew damn well. He looked at the jukebox, the lightly flashing colors around its neon border, bright and way too giddy for the whole dusty establishment. He wasn’t too sure about the rest of them, but...

“Yeah,” he said instead. “We are.” 

He thanked her for the instructions and the glass of water, but didn’t offer to pay her back. When she left, her dog following behind her, and Johnny wiled away what was left of the hour playing with the Pip-Boy. Maps, vitals, a weapons-dectector and automated aiming system (a blessing considering the fact that he had missed trying to grab the cup a few times, damned depth perception), another note asking if his eye was okay. Yes, yes it was okay. This thing was useful as hell, why was this only the second one he had ever seen? There was a small scuffle and a bit of a snarling match the next room over, but he didn’t pay it much attention. 

The wall clock struck eleven o’clock. The sun was almost halfway done with its arc across the sky, there was barely a shadow to be seen. Johnny left the empty glass where it was, picked up his bag, and walked out the front door of the Prospector Saloon, giving the jukebox a properly-wide berth. The man on the porch of the saloon didn’t say anything again. Again, Johnny didn’t reply. He paused underneath the small porch roof, his hands in his pockets and bag strapped across his shoulders and chest, watching the lone farmer and the snuffling Bighorners shuffling through the brown grass. Victor was still wheeling around, the Nevada flag on Doc’s property on top of the hill jerking about in the stale breeze. 

He felt like he was missing something, like there was something about this town that he had managed to skim over entirely, an entire chapter of some story he had just managed to by-step without a second though. Goodsprings was practically a ghost town, with tumbleweeds in the streets and honestly more Bighorners than actual people, the skeletons of charred houses resting in the middle of town with chipped bathtubs and toppled porcelain sinks still intact. Be that as it may, there was something nagging in the back of his head that for once wasn’t one of those damn whispers of her voice. That he was missing something about this place. That something was off. That this whole damn desert was ‘off.’ 

But then he mentally took a step back to look at himself, and maybe everything that stepped into the great American Wastes was a little ‘off’ in its own little fucked-up way. Johnny stepped off the porch, and turned to his Pip-Boy to enter Sunny’s instructions to Primm. 

Southeast it was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Self-reflection filler ftw honestly


	3. Nulla Tenaci Invia Est Via (For the Tenacious, No Road is Impassable)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS IS WHAT I GET FOR THINKING THAT 11TH GRADE WAS GOING TO BE EASY.
> 
> This took a disgustingly long time to post, especially because of college-level classes and the return of math as a subject I have to take. But I finally sat down and got Johnny to Primm, decided to throw in some backstory, and now (it's been like, what, eighteen days? wow) here's chapter three! 
> 
> (this took so long i am so sorry omg)

_One_

Later, Goodsprings, Johnny thought, loading his pistol and tucking it in the belt of his pants as he started down the ruined interstate, I won’t miss you. 

He didn’t look behind him as he hefted his bag over his shoulder, wiping his nose on the back of his hand and rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. There was nothing different about Goodsprings than the rest of this god-forsaken desert, a stretching plain of brown and irradiated grey stretching to a hazy horizon. The road was riddled with cracked slabs of asphalt having slid off to the side with chips of yellow paint still clinging on to the concrete. Hardy plants stretched up towards the sky, sparse and splitting, reddish-brown grass and stone obelisks erupting from the sandy soil and defunct power lines towering above the landscape. A nasty-looking crow perched on one of the telephone poles, rustling its dull feathers and squawking with a beak that had a crack down the side of his face.

A chipped, faded billboard dominated the side of the road about two miles away from Goodsprings, advertising Fancy Lad Snack Cakes, a smiling red-headed boy sitting on the floor in his proper khaki shorts and simple striped shirt. Johnny paused in front of it, staring up at the little white boy, awkwardly holding up his arm in comparison. The difference was stark. He took a deep breath, dropping his arm, and fished in his pocket for a box of cigarettes, and came up with nothing. 

“Goddammit,” Johnny growled. He leaned against the billboard pole, slinging the bag towards his chest and opening the flap. Sure, there was a change of socks and an extra shirt, a second box of ammunition, a few extra Stimpaks that Doc had insisted he have, but he could have sworn that he carried a second package of cigarettes with him. His lighter was still in its little front pocket, as if taunting him. He took it out its porch and pushed down on the trigger, the flame springing to life, burning blue at the base, and awkwardly held it there before letting the flame die and putting it back in its bag. He started off again. 

This was the easiest part of being a Courier. The walking, the being alone. He’d had Couriers that he’d hung out with in Primm ask him why he bleached his hair the way he did if he was always alone, and Johnny had always just shook his head. He didn’t have an answer, but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t for others. A small bloatfly buzzed around with its distended body a few dozen yards away, but Johnny didn’t pay it any mind. It was no use. While it may have been the easiest part, it was the scariest, and not because of the bloatflies. 

As hard as people were to deal with, they kept it away. He had learned to focus on the crunching of his feet in the dust and pounded gravel, and now with the Pip-Boy there was the Mojave Music Radio to occupy his head, but he couldn’t help it. Half the time he couldn’t figure out if it was a proper hallucination or a mirage from the heat or his eyes just playing tricks on him. No matter what it was, she always stayed away, but that didn’t stop it from being any less terrifying. She belonged in his dreams, his fever delusions, not standing atop a rusted airplane or presiding above the road from a crumbling cliff face. She was always in the corner of his eye, watching, and when he turned to face her, spit in her direction or when he finally snapped and whirled around to scream at her only for his voice to be lost in the wind, she had melded into the flitting shadow of an eagle or the hum of her voice was nothing more than the creaking sheet metal door of a rickety shack. 

He couldn’t remember much of Primm. If he had been out this way before, it certainly hadn’t stuck with him. It seemed that getting shot in the head had jarred out more of his brains than he had realized. And with half of his vision gone, he found himself scanning the charred landscape more than usual. He ended up chewing a stick that he had brushed off on his pants in lieu of a cigarette. 

He remembered hearing somewhere that sound didn’t carry in space, that the vacuum ate the words as they left your mouth as if it were trying to fill itself up. Maybe the Wastelands were the same way, and he was glad for it. When he turned around to howl, _”Leave me the fuck alone!”_ only a confused Radroach turned to look at him. He wondered why he even bothered to scream until his voice cracked when he found himself faced with an empty cliff side. 

But he walked on. 

A bit south of southeast, if Doc’s Pip-Boy was to be believed, he ran into a few overturned buses and people in jumpsuits sitting around play cards. He almost managed to step on a mine in the process. One of them noticed him when he yelled something unintelligible and nearly fell over. Johnny glared. She just shrugged helplessly and went back to her cards. Johnny growled and brushed off his pants, but stared at them from the corner of his good eye in case she decided to pick up the gun she had leaning against the table. He had dropped his stick, but didn’t pick it up again.

The first thing he saw of Primm was the roller coaster—it’s the first thing everybody saw of Primm. A road carved through a valley, tall green signs directing what could have been pre-War travellers on the right side and the arc of a roller coast on the left. At some point, crossing a small ravine, the Geiger counter on the Pip-Boy started crackling like it was a wildfire, but he just walked across it anyway and hoped that he wasn’t going to start losing his hair any time soon. 

And the radio kept playing, the gravel kept crunching underneath his feet, and he could finally see the town itself. It was small, not much to look at, and a collapsed waysign with ‘Primm’ clearly printed in white block letters was really one of the only reasons he didn’t question if there was another roller-coaster town he should be looking for. And he noticed the flag. 

It was white, or at least it had been at some point, tarnished with dust and dirt and torn at the edges so that it was probably more of a light brown than white. The words _New California Republic_ were stitched underneath in fine needlepoint, and the whole thing was topped off with the loving reproduction of a two-headed bear, one head growling and the other reaching up at stare at a simple star. 

The New California Republic. Hadn’t he heard of them before? He was sure of it. Dried-out palm trees towered over the buildings of Primm, surely a more interesting sight than the flag, but he ended up pausing in the street to watch it flutter in the wind. Sure, he had seen Brahmin before; hell, he had even seen mutated Brahmin that only sported a single head, but he had certainly never seen a two-headed bear before. Stories of the Yao Guai on the east coast were the closest he ever wanted to get, and he was staying at least three hundred miles away from those things at all times in the first place. 

“Hey! Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

Johnny’s head snapped around so hard he felt something crack, and a tall man in tan armor and a rather absurd army hat was walking down the ragged street at a pretty good clip that Johnny felt like he should back up a step. He didn’t though, and just crossed his arms instead. 

“Primm is off limits,” the man said. 

“What do you mean, off limits?” Johnny called across the strip of asphalt. 

“Some piece of shit convicts from the prison up the road have taken over the town,” the man said. The letters NCR was emblazoned on a small patch on his shoulder. So the flag was his, then. Was he a soldier? “Everyone’s either dead or in hiding.” _Not you,_ Johnny thought. “Besides, two tribes of raiders are stirring up shit further down the road. Just head over to Goodsprings, it’s safer there.”

“Hell no,” Johnny said. “I just came from Goodsprings. I’m walking in there.” 

The NCR soldier shrugged. “It’s your ass,” he said, rubbing at the tan lines a pair of goggles had made around his eyes. “Don’t say you weren’t warned.” The soldier went to sit on a piece of rubble as Johnny pulled the old pistol from the waistband of his pants, checked the clip, and racked the slide. The sound reverberated through the graveyard of hollow concrete buildings. 

Welcome to Primm, apparently. What an asshole.

 

_Two_

He turned off the radio on the Pip-Boy, slowed and evened his breathing. He hated the silence, but as long as he got rid of the sounds that other people could hear, he figured he’d be a little safer. Part of the road had collapsed, the rubble creating a ramp down to the underpass. The roller coaster towered over the town, and he jumped as the Pip-Boy registered that they had arrived in town. The fence around town didn’t have an opening on this side of the underpass’ debris, so he decided that he would walk around before climbing over if he had to. But that wasn’t a problem, thankfully, and he jogged down the underpass, hefted himself from the road onto the walkway when it veered back up, and started towards the Primm gates. 

A single garbage can fire was belching thick, black smoke up into the air, buildings with shattered facades and rebar sticking out like the ribs of a decaying animal. Rubble littered the street, one of the street lights at an awkward sort of angle. And there it was, the Mojave Express building, the letters lit up with dying neon although the M and the J had given up the ghost a long time ago. Strange, considering the fact that the rest of it looked deader than Goodsprings. And where were all the convicts that the NCR soldier had been talking about? 

There was a man slumped in front of the building. He had been dead for a good long while, flies buzzing around his corpse and his face thin, emaciated. Johnny swallowed, faltering a few yards away in the middle of the road. 

“Hey,” Johnny said, quieter than he thought he would. “Hey, you alive?” Of course he wasn’t. But he asked anyway and got no reply. “Just checking. God, that’s disgusting.” It wasn’t as if he wasn’t used to dead bodies. Hell, he had even been one for a little bit, and the Wasteland certainly had no shortage of them. But this was one of the guys that had asked about his hair at one point. He recognized him. Hadn’t his name been...Daniel? 

Johnny crouched by the corpse, holding his breath and batting away flies with one hand while grabbing the little note sticking out of his breast pocket with the other. The moment he had the note, he scrabbled to safety in front of the door. It was a contract, like his, except it was labeled 4/6, and he had been carrying fuzzy dice. Fuzzy dice? Johnny frowned and pocketed the note. Okay. That was disgusting. Commonplace, but disgusting. He collected himself, taking a deep breath and bouncing a bit on the balls of his feet before opening the door to the Mojave Express Outpost. 

It was completely and utterly empty. 

There was a radio crackling in the corner next to a deadened sphere of a robot stuck full of antenna, but it was defunct so Johnny didn’t pay it much mind. A good few dozens of cubbies lined the wall, the space above it plastered with posters and advertisements. The cubbies were just as bare as the rest of the building. 

“Hello?” Johnny called. “Are you fucking kidding me?” 

He stuck his pistol back into the waistband of his pants and walked behind the counter, his feet shuffling across pieces of paper recording transactions and deliveries, a host of waiver forms scattered across the hardwood floor. There was no answer. The robot didn’t look too badly broken, just a little dented, but he still wasn’t going to mess with it. It was still a robot, no matter what it looked like. 

Behind the wall of cubbies was a bed, a refrigerator, a stove, a table set with the food still on the plate. A home. Even the clock on the wall was stopped, the whole place had been frozen in time. Johnny paused where he stood, bringing his hands up to his face and looking around from between his fingers. The back window had been shattered, pieces of glass scattered across the floor. This had been a home. He hadn’t lived in a proper home for at least three years, but the memories of his parents’ farm down south still made him falter.

Collecting himself, he walked back to the front room and knelt on the floor among the mess of papers on the floor, picking up a few and rustling through them. There were dozens upon dozens of sheets, and he ended up getting a splinter trying to scrape them off the floor. He pulled it out with his teeth, spit it off to the side, and set to work reading through them. Maybe if he figured out who the hell had given him the package, he could at least get a clue. 

The front door opened, giving off a horrid long, low squeaking noise that made Johnny wonder how the hell he missed it when he walked in himself. 

“I saw the bitch come in here,” a gravelly voice said. Johnny’s throat slammed shut like a vice and he pulled the pistol from his belt again, checking to turn off the safety before remembering that he had never put it on in the first place. Shit, shit, shit, shit. Johnny mentally glowered at the NCR soldier and thought, _Found them, asshole._ He backed himself against the wall before realizing that he had literally just put himself in a corner and one of them turned to find him. 

It was a man, twice Johnny’s age, possibly three times his weight in sheer muscle, long hair and beard matted together into ratty ropes, skin worn and battle-scarred, cracked lips pulled back into an awful smile. He was carrying a rusted axe over his shoulder, arms bulging with veins and a wild look in his eye. His jumpsuit was torn at the shoulders and knees, and he wasn’t the only one. There was a second on the other side of the counter, but Johnny wasn’t exactly focused on him. He gave a small, nervous laugh that caught in his throat.

“Hey,” Johnny said. He held out both of his hands, one holding the pistol—pointed up at the ceiling in a vague show of harmlessness. “How’s it going?” 

“Shouldn’t be here, punk,” Ratty said. 

“I am now very aware of that,” Johnny said. “Can you please set the axe down? If it’s not too much trouble?”

“Not if you got that gun,” Ratty said. 

Well, shit. Johnny’s nervous smile fell—it had been faked, after all—and he raised the gun and put a bullet in Ratty’s head. 

The man almost looked surprised. The entry wound wasn’t awful, just a crack of red that caved in the side of his face; the bullet lodged in his skull and a second’s worth of shock flickered across his face before he fell. Johnny had never thought he was bad with guns. He had been raised on a Bighorner farm down south near a massive wall that made up what some called the Mexican-American border—Mom used to tell stories about their family had gotten across the line before the wall was finished and how lucky they were for it—and he was pretty sure he could knock more than a few cans off a fence and maybe a feral ghoul if it came down to the wire. But people? No, he had never been good with shooting people. That’s probably why he didn’t notice Ratty’s friend reach over the counter before the man had grabbed him by the shirt, hauled him up and over the table, and threw him to the floor.

The gun skittered from Johnny’s hand, laying painfully close on the hardwood floor, and he would have grabbed for it if what was left of his vision wasn’t swimming in and out of focus, if it didn’t feel like his skull had been cracked open. The second convict stood over him, a massive wound marring one of his disfigured hands, blood already dripping from a broken nose. 

“Shit,” Johnny said. 

The convict grabbed him by the front of his shirt and slammed him against the side of the counter. A piece of paper fluttered down to land on Ratty’s body. Johnny felt his teeth jar in his skull and hoped that nothing fell out of place, considering how recently he had been slapped back together. 

"Think you're tough, huh, bitch?" Ratty's friend snarled as Johnny fought to keep his vision straight. "Comin' in here like you the new goddamn sheriff?" The convict's hands balled in the fabric of Johnny's shirt, yanking him forward. “Fucking possum, feeding off other’s hard-earned kills.” 

“Actually,” Johnny wheezed, “that’s not—” 

“Not what?”

Johnny jerked forward and slammed his forehead into the convict’s nose, the man letting out a howl of rage and giving Johnny a split second to wrench himself out of the man’s grip and scramble across the floor for his pistol. Another second. Another pull of the trigger. And somehow, this was even worse. 

The second convict didn’t die right away like the first had. It took him a while. He fell onto the ground, eyes of glass and blood leaking from the hole in their skull that the bullet had carved out. Johnny almost threw up. That’s what he had looked like. That had been him not days ago, staring blankly at the man who had shot him in the face as blood leaked from the hole in the side of his head and— 

The man fell over. Johnny grabbed the counter and hauled himself to his feet, breathing heavy to keep the feeling of vomit from his throat. He had seen himself in the face of a man that had tried to kill him. He was pretty sure that wasn’t a good thing. He stood in the lobby of the Mojave Express, the spreading blood ruining the useless transaction logs, the ridges in the grip of the pistol cutting into the flesh of his palm, bruises along his side worse than the ones he already had. But he swallowed, jerked up his chin, and looked down his nose at them, even if his straight face faltered. 

He had to leave. He didn’t want to give the woman a reason to come. He swore loudly into the empty room as if it would ward her off, then stepped outside into the light of the setting sun. 

 

_Three_

In the grey twilight of Primm, the Mojave Express sign was a shining beacon of simplicity, even—or especially—with that blown-out M and J, the tilted P. The Bison Steve Hotel was a glaring example of excess, especially with that gaudy piece-of-shit roller coaster that was falling apart, pieces of the track falling to the dirt every few days with a resounding clang. Across the street was the Vikki and Vance Casino, the building large but the entrance simple enough. He couldn’t see the black, belching smoke of the oil drum anymore, and the boarded up windows of the Vikki and Vance had streams of light breaking through cracks in the reinforcements. There were old posters in glass cases hung up on the walls—there were marquee lights around all of them but only one of them worked. 

So he opened the door and stepped inside, and when he squinted against the bright lights of the casino, he felt the congealing blood on his brow, the fact that his fake eye might have been a little out of place, that he held a loaded pistol in his hand and splatters of red on his knuckles where he dug for Daniel’s courier letter. The least he could do at this point was to walk in and hope that nothing killed him. 

He wasn’t expecting an old man to pause in the foyer, surrounded by broken and spiderweb-cluttered slot machines, to pull a cigarette from his pocket and say, “I don’t know what brought you to Primm, youngster, but you might want to rethink your plans. Town’s gone to hell.”

“Don’t I know it,” Johnny said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you're gonna ruin your hair if you keep getting blood in it like this johnny


End file.
